This past International Women’s Day, we embraced the 2025 theme, For ALL Women and Girls: Rights, Equality, and Empowerment, and took the opportunity to reflect on who we’re truly advocating for when we speak about the rights of women.
Who are we talking about when we say, "ALL” women?
Whether you’re advocating for inclusion in frontline services, at a national policy level, or even within your workplace, it’s crucial that we ask this question now more than ever.
Within abuse and violence work, the unique experiences of LGBT+ women can be minimised, excluded, or erased. At Galop, we work with a diverse range of women, including cisgender, transgender, and queer women, who have experienced hate crime, sexual violence, domestic abuse, and conversion practices.
As the UK’s LGBT+ anti-abuse charity, we've put together some considerations to help broaden your organisation’s understanding to foster greater inclusion for all women.
The Importance of Inclusive Language
Language is powerful. The language used in external and internal communications can indicate how inclusive your organisation is for all women. It can be the difference between an LGBT+ woman deciding whether your organisation is a safe place for them or not.
As a starting point, we’ve put together a brief glossary of terms that can help guide your journey toward providing more inclusive support for all women:
- Cisgender/Cis Woman: A person whose gender identity is woman and this aligns with their sex assigned at birth.
- Transgender/Trans Woman: A person whose gender identity is woman but this does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth.
- Non-binary: A person whose gender identity does not sit comfortably in the female/male binary. They may describe who they are as both a man and a woman, or neither. This identity can be static or fluctuating.
- Biological Sex:A categorisation of male, female, or intersex based on physical, hormonal or genetic characteristics. Some people will feel represented by their biological sex, and others will not. The relevance of this is up to the individual and should always be respected.
- Gender Identity: A person’s sense of their gender, whether male, female, or something else (e.g., genderqueer, non-binary, gender fluid). This may or may not align with the sex assigned at birth
Why It’s Vital to Include ALL Women
It’s crucial to embrace the diversity of all women’s experiences of abuse and violence. If we ignore the distinct challenges faced by some women, we risk minimising or excluding their experiences. This erasure can prevent LGBT+ women from accessing the support they need, because their experiences might be dismissed as "not serious enough" or "not valid”.
By embracing diversity and welcoming nuance, we can create a world where every woman feels seen, heard, and supported. If we continue to build our support systems, resources, and lens of abuse only around cisgender and heterosexual women’s experiences, we’re always going to be offering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach which renders many women’s struggles invisible and fails to meet their needs.
The Consequences of Limited Representation
A lack of representation of LGBT+ women’s distinct and individual experiences of abuse can be a key barrier to survivors accessing support when they need it. Many LGBT+ victims and survivors fear that support services won’t understand their LGBT+ identity, or that they’ll experience further anti-LGBT+ prejudice when trying to access support. For LGBT+ women whose experiences of gender-based violence don’t fit within the ‘public story’ of what abuse looks like, additional distinct barriers are formed that limit or prohibit their access to support.
The ‘public story’ of abuse is the way our society pictures violence and abuse. This ‘story’ defines how we imagine who “real perpetrators” and “genuine victims” are, and is informed by gendered stereotypes which tend to centre heterosexual, white, and able-bodied people.
In Galop’s national helplines and advocacy services, we find that LGBT+ survivors often don’t use terms like "sexual violence" or "domestic abuse" when describing their experiences. Instead, they might express feelings of fear, being at their breaking point, or not knowing where to turn for help.
In our research on LGBT+ experiences of sexual violence, women who were sexually assaulted by other women frequently reported that they didn’t initially recognise their experience as sexual violence because society hadn’t portrayed women as perpetrators. One survivor shared, “I was literally unaware that women could commit acts of sexual violence. I thought only men could do that”.
The absence of representation and recognition of LGBT+ experiences within the ‘public story’ of abuse can stop survivors from identifying the true nature of the abuse they’ve endured and contribute to them feeling that they’re not eligible for support.
Risk Isn’t Equally Distributed Among LGBT+ Women
For over 40 years, Galop has worked on the frontline supporting LGBT+ women. In our work, we've learned that risks and barriers aren’t equally shared across the community. LGBT+ women often face multiple layers of discrimination and abuse due to their gender identity and sexual orientation, in addition to factors like disability, language, immigration status, race, faith, and class.
In our2023 research, we found that trans+ women face higher rates of sexual violence than other LGBT+ individuals. Among 49 trans women surveyed, 31% reported being sexually assaulted by a stranger - nearly double the proportion of LGBT+ respondents overall (17%).
Moreover, factors like poverty, asylum-seeking status, mental health challenges, and other inequalities significantly increase the risk and impact of violence for LGBT+ women. When providing support or responses that speak to all women’s experiences, we must remember that risk isn’t distributed equally. We should be considering the differing risks each woman, as an individual, may face.
The Power of Intersectionality
Intersectionality - a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the unique experiences of Black Women who were erased from discussions on both race and gender - is a powerful framework that helps us understand the complexities of identity.
We should be considering how multiple aspects of a person’s identity intersect to shape their experience of the world. These intersecting identities can impact a person’s experiences of abuse and violence, and create specific barriers to accessing support.
When designing services, projects, or products, organisations should apply an intersectional lens to think about all the different lived experiences that fall within womanhood. Ask if you’re considering, representing, and supporting all of those experiences.
By consistently reflecting on intersectional barriers and developing new ways to make space for individual experiences, you’re sending a clear message to your colleagues, clients, and collaborators that you’re not settling for a ‘one-size-fits-all' approach – that you care about every woman being safe, supported, and meaningfully included.
